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Bill Ackman has pledged $400 million to a new brain research institute in Manhattan, months after his daughter suffered a stroke that left her unable to speak, see or walk.
The Pershing Square founder set out what happened in a long post on X to his three million followers. Lucy Ackman was found unconscious in her New York apartment earlier this year, and paramedics who arrived did not know what was wrong with her. A brain scan later showed a massive haemorrhage, which surgeons removed in a lengthy operation.
Ackman and his wife, the designer and researcher Neri Oxman, have established the Ackman Oxman Institute, a Manhattan non-profit focused on brain research and patient recovery. He said the aim is to build the world's greatest brain research, rehabilitation, recovery, human optimisation and longevity institute.
The money is not cash. Ackman is giving 10 million shares in Pershing Square, his New York-listed fund, worth roughly $400 million at Thursday's close.
The institute will occupy a 400,000 square foot Manhattan building, part of which comprises the repurposed studios currently used by Saturday Night Live.
Its design departs from the academic model. Ackman said the institute will measure itself on patient outcomes rather than published papers, and will operate with what he described as highly commercial instincts, including a venture capital arm that will seed-fund and spin out the treatments and medications it develops. That structure would allow a non-profit to capture returns from its own discoveries and recycle them into further research, rather than licensing them out.
He also intends to point it at artificial intelligence.
"The advance of AI in the last few years will also enable us to greatly accelerate our mission," Ackman said, adding that AI still has a great deal to learn about human intelligence and the brain, and that the institute should sit at the forefront of the relationship between the two.
The pledge ranks among the largest single philanthropic commitments announced this year.
Bloomberg's Billionaires Index puts Ackman's fortune at about $8 billion. He built Pershing Square into one of the most recognisable investment firms on Wall Street through concentrated and frequently public positions, most famously a $1 billion short against the weight-loss supplement company Herbalife, which he called a pyramid scheme and campaigned publicly to have investigated. Regulators did not act as he had hoped and the position was eventually unwound, though the episode established his reputation.
He has become one of the more politically vocal figures in American finance in recent years, and was among the most prominent business supporters of Donald Trump alongside Elon Musk.
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